I do feel like a fraud a lot of the time because I've never been interested in people who say 'I'm a writer', 'I'm an artist'. Too much is made of the role and not enough of the work. We are such a celebrity-driven age and a status-driven age, that the status becomes more important than the actual work.

The fallacy is that you have to hold some sort of stake in the grief or horror in order to write about it - I think the opposite is true.

We have a very foolish notion in Western countries that progress delivers freedom. But progress doesn't necessarily bring moral virtue.

Most of us have loved. And the terror for a writer is that readers will forgive you so much, but they won't forgive you one false note about love, about which they too are expert.

The monsters demand less of you as a writer because they're probably closer to who you are.

I think it's common sense to shy away from the erotic. Perhaps this grand experiment, which started with Lady Chatterley's Lover, of seeing what you can write and how you can write about sex, has reached a certain weary terminus with Fifty Shades of Grey.

Love is a glimpse of hope. To love is to hope. When we abandon hope, we cease to exist.